The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Faro is a beauty. She catches the eye. She caught Peter Cudworth’s eye. She had caught the eye of the black American at the next table, though he had not attempted to catch hers.

  The Cudworth cousins ordered a malt each, and Faro succeeded in signing for them. ‘You’re my guest in my country,’ she said broadly. He liked that.

  They settled, happy amidst the executive egalitarian décor, and exchanged the stories of their lives. Consanguinity had brought them together in this random staging post, but how close a degree of consanguinity could they establish? How much did their DNA overlap? And how had they both come to hear of the Hawthorn project? There was much to discuss, and no danger in discussing it, for both Faro and Mr Iowa were in rapid transit, and would not clog or cling. They were settled, with a smoky glass of Laphroaig, but they were settled only for a nightwatch. They were not settlers. They were hunter-gatherers. They were on the move, like most of the moneyed millennial masses, and in the morning they would move on.

  Professor Peter Cudworth of Iowa, as he revealed himself to be, was an economist, born in New Jersey and educated at MIT in Boston (yes, nodded Faro, she did know what that was). He now taught a branch of business studies in the Midwest. Booms and slumps were his passion, and he knew a great deal about stock-market cycles, though he admitted that he had not proved very good at profiting from his knowledge. He had his theories and his hunches, and sometimes they were proved right on the Dow Jones, but not often enough for him to take any big risks with his moderate income. He wasn’t seriously interested in money. He was interested only in the theory of money. His professorial salary was quite enough for him. He liked his students. He liked most of his colleagues. He liked Iowa. He wasn’t complaining. And what about Faro? What was her field?

  Faro liked Peter Cudworth. She was usually affable and disposed to like people at this time of night. Peter Cudworth was of medium height, and stocky, as were most of the Cudworths, but he was attractive. He had pleasing short curly brown hair, so tightly curled that she longed to run her fingers through it, and a small darling Dutch beard. He looked like a little Cavalier, a curled cavalier of the West. A pleasant, friendly, cousinly sort of chap. With, as he had almost immediately made clear, a wife and two children back home.

  Faro’s field, she declared, was the history of science, which she had studied at the University of Waterford. She now worked for a scientific magazine called Prometheus, once a weekly periodical of distinction, but recently transformed, she had to own, into a popular rag. A new and pushy editor had taken its eminent title successfully down-market and was thriving on a mixture of mildly sensationalized stories and serious reportage. It had a lot of brightly coloured pictures and very large headlines. It was doing very well. The public was into science, which was lucky for Faro, and she was well in with its editor, which was also lucky for Faro. He gave her a free hand with her section, a women’s section called, with a marked lack of originality, ‘Pandora’s Box.’ Most of this, Faro volunteered, Faro could write standing on her head, but her editor also sent her off to cover conferences or to interview eminent persons for the main body of the mag. She got some good trips out of it. She liked travelling. She was also supposed to be writing a popular book on changing concepts of evolutionary determinism, based on her own rapidly dating thesis, but she wasn’t getting on so well with that. She kept getting distracted. But it was a good topic, didn’t he think?

  Was it the magazine or the book that had taken her to Breaseborough? he wanted to know. Well, both and neither, she said. She’d been browsing through new gene-map theories and stories about mitochondrial DNA on the Internet when suddenly the name Cudworth had leaped up at her, and she’d got on to Dr Hawthorn’s project. She was herself a Cudworth, by direct matrilineal descent. Her great-grandmother Ellen had been born a Cudworth. So that makes an eighth of me a Cudworth, doesn’t it? But the magazine had been keen for her to cover the story anyway. It was too big for ‘Pandora’s Box,’ so she thought she’d try to write a proper feature on it. The magazine had agreed to pay her expenses, anyway. And yes, she would like another. The same again, thank you.

  She herself was, she explained, when Peter came back from the bar, by way of being a neo-Lamarckian. Or a Bergsonian. She didn’t hold with Darwinian or genetic determinism. Of course she knew that that was how things were, but she didn’t like the way things were. She didn’t approve of it. And that was no doubt why she’d been attracted to tackle the subject in the first place. As an act of pointless but heroic resistance. A forlorn hope. She’d like to think one could rediscover an argument that would reinstate the freedom of the will and the adaptability of the species. Otherwise everything was too damn depressing, wasn’t it? (Here, she breathed deeply, her large eyes shone, and her broad and gentle bosom lifted and sank with the tide of her feeling.) How could one, asked Faro, believe that everything was genetically or environmentally determined, and at the same time that all mutation was random? Hadn’t Peter himself just been speaking about the randomness and unpredictability of cycles in the stock market? Did he really believe they were random? Where does the random meet the determined? What is the name of their meeting place?

  Faro’s brain tended to race, late at night. Great swathes of ideas associated themselves freely in her head, and their colours merged and swirled. She knew she was the least disciplined, the least logical of thinkers, but she also knew that there was something in what she was thinking. Some thought was happening to her or in her or round about her. These psychedelic patternings might not be described as thought by more rigorous minds, but they were something. She could see them, she could feel them. They were not nothing.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘there must have been something, some mental process, that shifted some of the Cudworths and the Bawtrys out of this dump. Something that made for migration. I don’t believe it was just the melting of the ice, or the changing climate, or the discovery of coal, or the end of the coal industry. They didn’t just flow about, like water flowing downhill. Some stayed, some moved. It was a movement of the mind. My lot stayed around here a lot longer than yours. How did yours get away?’

  A memory, just beyond retrieval, like a shadow of an unremembered dream, is nagging at Faro. But it is not her memory, so she cannot remember it. It is not in reach. It hovers and flickers, with a faint colouring, a rustling, an inarticulate appeal.

  Peter Cudworth said that his grandparents had emigrated from Leeds in the 1920s, in the slump years. They had gone initially to Canada, and then on to the States. His grandfather had been a civil engineer. His father was a lawyer, now retired, and his mother an all-American-Swedish dietician. They had done well, the emigrant Cudworths, had attained a respectable, comfortable middle-class life. The next generation had done well too. Peter had a brother who designed computer software in Chicago, a sister who ran a catering company in Cincinnati. His grandparents had been right to leave when they did. What was it that had made them get up and go? she insisted. It was hard for him to say. It was all too long ago. They’d been proud of their English roots, of course, but they’d never shown any signs of wanting to come back. His grandmother had kept in touch with her side of the family, with the Coles of Headingley, but his Cudworth grandfather hadn’t bothered. He’d lost touch. Peter couldn’t even remember any Cudworth Christmas cards, certainly no family newsletters. He’d made a new life, and that was all there was to it. Not very exciting, not very romantic. Quite a dull story.

  So why had he come over? Faro wanted to know. Why had he been to the meeting? What had he hoped to find? Why had he bothered?

  Why is she pressing him? Peter is equable, and does not mind being pressed.

  He’d become curious, he said. He’d been coming over to England anyway on business, his first visit to the old country, and he’d decided, while he was here, to try to find out where the Cudworths came from. Family trees were all the fashion in the States, she must know that? Everybody seemed to be trying to trace origins. The origins of
families and of species. So he’d thought, why not? He too, like Faro, had found the details of the Hawthorn meeting on the Internet. The dull name of Cudworth glimmered up at him as soon as he started to look for it. He’d joined the One-Name Society, contacted Bill Cudworth, and here he was. And it had all been quite interesting, hadn’t it?

  ‘Quite interesting and quite boring,’ said Faro, fixing him with her vast dark eyes. She was not wholly satisfied with his mundane explanation.

  He laughed it off. Yes, he agreed, they didn’t seem the most dynamic group in the world. They weren’t exactly the cutting edge, were they, the Breaseborough Cudworths?

  ‘You don’t know this part of the world,’ accused Faro. ‘I do.’

  ‘So you still have family living around here?’

  Faro described her Great-Aunt Dora, her grandmother’s only sister. Dora Bawtry, daughter of Ellen Cudworth Bawtry, born before the First World War.

  ‘Never budged,’ concluded Faro. ‘Been here all her lifelong life. All her one and only life.’

  ‘So your grandmother must have married out?’ probed Peter Cudworth from Iowa, staring at the exotic Faro, whose appearance suggested something far from the Anglo-Saxon, far from the pre-Anglo-Saxon, far from Cotterhall. There was something dark and luxuriant in Faro that surely came from over the hills and far away.

  ‘No, not really,’ said Faro. ‘In fact, not at all. She married the boy next door. Her childhood sweetheart. But she did get away. They moved to another world. A million light-years away, all the way to Surrey. That’s in the south of England, you know. That’s where my grandparents ended up. I don’t know how they managed it. I’m not sure if they did manage it. My mother goes on about how they didn’t manage it. I used to take it for granted that they lived in Surrey. But now it seems a mystery. And as for my parents—how they got together, God alone knows.’

  Faro Gaulden, suspected Peter Cudworth from Iowa, had not liked the Cudworth reunion. Something about it had disturbed her. He’d found it a bit disturbing himself, but he was used to keeping his unease under cover. He didn’t tell stories to strangers. He wasn’t sure if it would be wise to listen to any more confidences from Faro. Was she dangerous, was she compromising, was she trouble? He didn’t need trouble: he had trouble enough at home. Her mood, which had at first seemed so sweet and high, was wavering now, like a needle attracted to some invisible force, plunging and dipping, then soaring up again. She was a stranger to him and he could not read her. Was she always like this? There was nothing sexual in her manner: he was accustomed to the almost routine, juvenile and to him unattractive sexiness of some of his female students, and there was none of that in Faro. But then, she was English, and maybe they did things differently here? She was, he guessed, a little older than most of his postgraduates. He had been warned incessantly about the dangers of sexual harassment, and knew well the litigation that could arise from a shut door, an open door, a friendly hand, a harsh word, a kind word, a late-night drink, a low grade, a high grade. But Faro Gaulden’s behaviour, though animated, was neither sexy nor provocative. It was intense, pleading, poignant. And this was a motel in Yorkshire, not a campus in the Midwest. And she was his cousin. He would not flee. He would not play the coward. He stayed, trapped by her violet, violent dark eyes.

  He stayed, and Faro Gaulden recited her history to Peter Cudworth. She had not intended to do this, but it broke from her, and flowed.

  She told him of her father’s death. She galloped through the dreadful story. Nine months dead, her father was, and he had died of the drink. Cirrhosis of the liver. He had been a desperate, wild, mad, drinking man. A useless man, a squalid, sordid, wasted man. A glamorous, handsome man. Oh, the waste of it, groaned Faro. And oh, the wretched conjunction of her mother and her father! How could such an improbable union ever have come to be? Her mother, niece of Dora Bawtry, daughter of Bessie Bawtry—her mother, wretched, suffering, miserable, betrayed, abandoned, undone! What a sad life she had led! What freakish current of history had swirled her mother and her father together? And her father’s life—how it had been wasted and blasted, blasted and wasted. And now he was dead.

  ‘My father,’ said Faro, with an attempt at mock and comic dignity, regaining composure, ‘was not even English. He was a stick of driftwood from the Second World War. He was a tragic accident. He was the son of refugees. He wasn’t English, but he wasn’t properly Jewish either. You’d have known where you were if he’d been Jewish. I’d have known who I was if he’d been Jewish. He was partly Jewish, of course, but part of him was Polish, part German, part Slovakian. I don’t know who he was. He was a Central European disaster. Actually’ (here she changes tone and tack), ‘actually, he was born in England. He had a British passport. So I suppose he was English, really. What does it matter what he was? He was a disaster. He drank himself to death. You can’t imagine the unspeakable funeral. All those women. It was ludicrous. It wasn’t tragic, it was ridiculous. The waste of it all, the terrible waste.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Peter Cudworth inadequately. It was clear that this young woman had been, still was, obsessed by her father.

  ‘I suppose you could blame my mother said Faro wildly, ‘for letting all this happen. You can blame her for conniving, for collaboration. But I don’t blame my mother. I blame him. Though she ought to have had more sense.’

  Peter Cudworth, who felt himself in no position to take sides or to blame anybody, and who had lost the thread of her impassioned diatribe, said mildly, ‘I suppose we all blame our parents for a lot of things that can’t really be helped.’

  Faro did not hear him. She was melting and glittering and glowing with violet electric light, in her heliotrope dress, as she turned towards an invisible subterranean sun.

  ‘They called me Faro after the Faeroe Islands!’ she suddenly cried. ‘Can you imagine the stupidity, the mockery! How dared they? They said I was conceived on the Faeroes! The Dry Islands! Puffins and whale blubber! What a joke!’

  Peter Cudworth murmured that Faro seemed quite a nice name to him. How did she spell it? When she’d first introduced herself he’d seen it more as an Egyptian sort of Pharaoh, but he must have got that wrong?

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ said Faro. ‘You’re called a nice sensible name. Peter’s a good name, a good rocklike name. My whole life said Faro loudly and earnestly, ‘has been ruined by my name. And they didn’t even spell it right. They spelt it like some damn stupid tourist airport in Portugal. F-A-R-O, that’s how I spell it. They said it looked nicer like that on the birth certificate. I ask you. Who wants to be called after an airport?’

  The barman coughed, and ostentatiously wiped the bar once more. The clock struck one.

  Faro and Peter made their way to their respective beds. They shook hands in the featureless corridor, and Faro said she was sorry if she’d gone on a bit about her dad. It had all been a bit upsetting. And it had been a long day, hadn’t it? Peter said it had been a real pleasure to meet her, he’d enjoyed talking to her. And so, politely, subdued, they parted.

  Faro, in the safety of her bedroom, poured herself a glass of carbonated water from the minibar and sat down on her bed. Her mind was curdling and churning as violently clashing images washed around in it. Was it her mind, was it her spirit, was it her soul, or was it merely a processing machine? What was it that contained these pictures, these memories? Would the vessel burst and break? Sometimes she thought she could not stand it anymore. Talking about her father had set in motion the terrible turbulence which was always waiting to engulf her and sweep her away. Was it from him that it came?

  She sees Auntie Dora’s little house, that grim warm ark stranded on the shelf of time. She sees Golders Green Cemetery, and her father’s many mourners. She sees her mother, hard-faced, proud, stoic, ceremonially dressed in melodramatic black. She sees her grandfather, a sweet and patient man, and her grandmother, a scolding shrew. She sees her Gaulden grandparents, washed up back in the 1930s on the Finchley Road,
and hanging on there through her sixties childhood. She tries not to see her father, Nick Gaulden, but he is there, unbidden. He is everywhere. He will not lie quietly.

  Faro had loved her father. Her father had been much loved, and he himself had loved many. He had been a Don Juan, a seducer. First, he had seduced her mother, and ruined her life for ever. (That is not how Faro’s mother sees it, but it is how Faro, in this stage of her life, chooses to see it.) Then he had moved on, and loved and ruined others. Faro had suffered a disturbed childhood, reared in a succession of households of grossly unorthodox complexity —ménages à trois, à quatres, à six, households without a single responsible adult apart from her nobly enduring mother, households where no meals appeared on time. There had been quiet flats where Faro and her mother were alone, and noisy houses where they had taken in battered refugees from Nick Gaulden’s other passions. Nick Gaulden, unlike Don Juan, had found it hard to abandon his mistresses. He had let them pile up behind him and around him, in heaps of twisted wreckage, smouldering, impacted. As though he feared to be left alone on a dark night. As though he feared to lose them all.

  In her turbulent childhood, Faro had oscillated from extreme to extreme, from happiness to despair, from neglect and alcoholic excesses to gleams of joy and elation. Had it been heroic, squalid, creative, experimental, desperate, or all these things? Had her history been a blueprint for a future of the extended family, or an unrelieved, irredeemable mess? She had tried to hate her father, but had failed. Her mother had tried to hate her father, and seemed to have succeeded, for her mother had survived, had made sense of her life, had prospered. But what had been the price of that survival? Faro’s mother Chrissie has paid too high a price. You can tell that from the sharp set of her lips, from the wrinkles round her eyes, from the sharp edge of her tongue.